The Lady and the Peacock (2 page)

Traveling across Rangoon six days before the poll, I had the luck to hail a taxi driver who spoke some English. I asked him, “Are you going to vote?'

“No!” he said, “I don't like it! It is a lie! They are lying to all the people, and all the world. They are very greedy! They don't know what democracy is . . .” Later he said that his wife was going to vote and he was under pressure to do the same: She was afraid that if they didn't they might be killed.

He told me that he had a degree in Engineering from Insein Institute of Technology. So why, I asked him, was he driving a taxi?

“I am driving because I don't want to work for the government, because that means stealing. I want to work for my country and I want to do good. I don't want to steal! Money is not the important thing for our people. The important thing is to get democracy . . .”

It was the strangest election I have ever come across. The party that had won the previous election by a country mile, Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), would have been allowed to participate if it had recognized the new constitution and if it had been prepared to expel Aung San Suu Kyi and all other members in detention or prison. As the party declined to do this, it was de-registered, becoming a non-party. The biggest party, which in the end won handily, had only been in existence for a few months: It was created by the simple trick of turning the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a regime-sponsored mass organization to which all government employees are compelled to belong, into a party, the USDP. The other parties running included small split-offs from the NLD opposed to that party's decision not to run.

During the weeks of the election campaign, the mood in Rangoon was completely flat. There were no election meetings, no posters stuck up, no
loudspeaker vans patrolling the streets blaring their parties' messages. The only indications that something out of the ordinary was under way were a few billboards for the USDP, and daily homilies in the regime's newspaper, the
New Light of Myanmar
, urging people to vote.

“A voter can choose not to vote,” one such homily noted, “but a person who is found guilty of inciting the people to boycott the election is liable for not more than one year's prison term or a fine of 100,000 kyats or both.”
¹

A cartoon in the paper showed a group of smiling citizens striding towards an arch inscribed “Multiparty democracy general election.” Beyond was a modern city of glass and steel skyscrapers, captioned “Peaceful, modern and developed democratic nation.” “Join hands,” said one of the citizens, “the goal is in sight.”

Another article in the same paper recalled that there had been an election twenty years before, whose result had not been honored. “The election was meaningless because it looks like runners starting for the race without having any goal, aim and rule. In other words, it looks like a walk taken by a blind person.[sic]”

Despite the references to the 1990 poll, all mention of Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues was rigorously excluded from all printed and broadcast material.

What actually distinguished the 1990 poll was the fact that the polling and the counting of votes were conducted reasonably fairly: That's why the NLD and its ethnic allies won 94 percent of the seats.
²
Subsequently, the regime agonized for nearly twenty years over how to shake off the memory of that humiliation and somehow acquire legitimacy as rulers. This election was the way they finally chose to play it.

It was inconceivable that their proxies would win if the election was free and fair, so they did not want foreigners poking their noses in. Offers from abroad to monitor the polls were firmly rejected, as were visa applications by foreign journalists. I was admitted as a tourist, as on previous occasions.

The most flagrant way the poll was rigged was by regimented voting in advance: State employees and others were dragooned into voting en masse for the regime's proxy party.
³
“We discussed how to take advance votes from members of thirty civil societies in Rangoon,” a USDP official told
Irrawaddy
, a news website run by Burmese journalists in exile.
⁴
Civil
servants and members of regime-sponsored organizations including the Red Cross and the fire brigade were among those required to vote in advance. In this way getting out the vote—in many cases days in advance—became a quasi-military operation. In Rangoon constituencies where opposition candidates stood a chance of winning, pre-cooked ballots were poured in to ensure a favorable result. Two days after the poll, without giving any details, a senior USDP official was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying, “We have won about 80 percent of the seats. We are glad.”
⁵

By then I and several other undercover reporters had been expelled. I watched the next act of the drama in the office of the NLD-Liberated Areas (NLD-LA) in Mae Sot, on the Thailand–Burma border.
⁶

Although Aung San Suu Kyi's eighteen-month detention sentence expired on Saturday, November 13th, it was not clear until the last minute whether she would be released or not. But her party was optimistic: “There is no legal basis for detaining her any longer,” said her lawyer.
⁷
Two days before, women members of the NLD had started cleaning the party's headquarters, which had been closed and shuttered for much of the time she was in detention, and repairing the air conditioners.

Nearly 2,200 political prisoners remained locked up in Burma's jails, but shortly after 5
PM
on November 13th, Suu's seven and a half years of detention finally came to an end. At 5:15
PM
on that day, the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “Soldiers armed with rifles and tear-gas launchers pushed aside the barbed-wire barriers blocking University Avenue, and a swarm of supporters dashed the final hundred yards to the villa's gate. Twenty minutes later, a slight 65-year-old woman popped her head over her red spiked fence.”
⁸

The crowd chanted “Long live Aung San Suu Kyi!” “I'm very happy to see you!” she yelled, barely audible over the chanting. “It's been a very long time since I've seen you.” Rangoon was a prison camp no more. “Some people sobbed out loud, many shed tears and everybody shouted words of salutation and love,” the
Times
of London reported on November 14th. “For ten minutes Aung San Suu Kyi could do nothing but bathe in the acclaim of the crowd.”

The previous week an NLD veteran, one of the party's founders, released from prison after nineteen years, had told me, “When I and others were released it was like watering a flower in a pot—the plant is
getting fresh, that's all. But when Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is released it will be like the beginning of the monsoon, the whole countryside green and blooming.”
⁹
And indeed for some days the mood was very much like that.

Burma's military regime had played its best card with great astuteness. In the cacophonous celebrations of the next days, which echoed around the world, the outrageous theft of the election a week before was completely forgotten.

A
UNG SAN SUU KYI
emerged from detention in November 2010 as radiant as a lily, as if she had just returned from a holiday. The generals had contrived the election, from which she had been barred, and made sure that their proxy party won. Her marginalization was now official. But none of that made any difference: Her gate was besieged by thousands of supporters, braving the fury of the regime, in the first scenes of mass happiness in Rangoon in more than eight years.

From the earliest days of her political life, Suu has been attacked by the regime as the “poster girl” of the West. If that was a gross exaggeration in 1989, today it would be an understatement: She is by far the most famous woman politician in the world never to have held office, the most famous Burmese person since the late UN Secretary General U Thant and, along with the Dalai Lama, the most feted exponent of nonviolent political resistance since Mahatma Gandhi. She is a familiar figure to millions of people around the world who have no idea how to pronounce her name or where to place Burma on the world map.

But the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi did nothing out of the ordinary before becoming a political star—that she insisted on being described as a housewife—has led many people who should know better to underrate her.
¹

Thant Myint-U, grandson of U Thant, in his book
The River of Lost Footsteps
, casts Suu as little more than a footnote to a narrative dominated down the ages by ruthless military men.
²
Michael W. Charney, in his
History of Modern Burma
, sees her as significant chiefly as the embodiment, for the regime, of the menace from abroad, rather than as a positive force for real change.
³
A previous biographer, Justin Wintle, comes to the eccentric conclusion that she herself is to blame for her fate. “Aung San Suu Kyi has become the perfect hostage,” he writes. “. . . Kept in captivity in part brought about by her own intransigence, the songbird's freedom has a price that no one can, or any longer dares, pay. The latest apostle of nonviolence is imprisoned by her creed.”
⁴

To blame Suu for being locked up for so many years is perverse, like blaming Joan of Arc for being burned at the stake. Yet it is true that her imprisonment has in a sense been voluntary, and this is one of the things that explains her enduring and almost universal popularity with ordinary Burmese people.

Suu's detention was never strictly comparable to Nelson Mandela's twenty-seven years' imprisonment on Robben Island because, unlike Mandela, she was free to leave. At any time in her years of confinement between 1989 and 2009, she could have phoned her contact in the regime, packed a suitcase, said goodbye to her faithful housekeepers and companions, taken a taxi to the airport and flown away; but it would have been with the certainty, if she did, that her passport would have been cancelled and that she would never have been permitted to return. And by flying away to the safe and loving embrace of the outside world, she would have vindicated all the slurs of her enemies, and the worst apprehensions of her supporters.

This choice is something she has rarely discussed, probably because it touches on the most personal and painful aspects of the life she has lived since 1988—on her decision effectively to renounce her role as a wife and mother. But the reality of this choice has also been used by the regime to torture her. This became most brutally true in January 1999, four years after the end of her first spell of detention. The news arrived from Oxford that her husband, Michael, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and did not have long to live. Despite this, and despite appeals from many well-placed friends including Prince Charles and Countess Mountbatten, the regime refused to grant him a visa to enable him to visit her. The intention was clear: to induce her to follow the dictates of her heart and fly home to his bedside, as nine years before she had flown to Rangoon to the bedside of her mother. Knowing she would never be let back in, she refused to do it. Those in Asia and elsewhere who regarded her as lacking in female warmth felt confirmed in their view. Barely three months later, Michael died.

Justin Wintle is therefore perhaps right to use the word “intransigence” to describe Suu's attitude through her years of confinement. It would have been entirely human, completely understandable, if at some point she had given up and gone home. No one would have blamed her. She would have been hailed and feted everywhere she went. She could
have spent precious weeks with her dying husband, and today would no doubt be dashing from conference to conference, banging the drum for Burmese democracy. What difference would it have made if the lights in number 54 University Avenue had gone out for good?

The answer is, a great deal of difference. For Suu's impact has been spiritual and emotional as much as political.

As the letters she wrote to Michael and her essays on Burma both before and after her return make clear, Suu was acutely aware of the suffering of her people long before she returned to live there: of the poverty forced on the inhabitants of this naturally rich land by the idiocy of its rulers, on the stunting of bodies and minds by criminal economic and social policies. When this privileged expatriate flew to Rangoon in 1988 and found herself in the thick of the greatest popular uprising in the nation's history, something clicked. Her people's suffering was no longer something distant and academic: It was a cause she embraced, with the passion to change it. Choosing to form and lead the NLD and fight the election, she made a compact with her country: They were no longer separate, no longer divisible. The harder the regime tried to paint her as a foreign decadent, a puppet of the West, a bird of passage, a poster girl, the more fiercely she insisted that she was one with her countrymen.